In the aftermath of the UK’s vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s victory in the US election, many who expected the results to go the other way were left shocked. How could this happen when almost everyone they knew had backed the other side?

If they’d been paying attention to Eli Pariser back in 2011, they might have realised their disbelief was at least partly down to the filter bubbles that most of us occupy online without ever really being aware of it.

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“If you only see posts from folks who are like you, you’re going to be surprised when someone very unlike you wins the presidency,” Pariser tells the Guardian.

Five years before the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, Pariser published his New York Times bestseller The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. The book laid out how our algorithmically personalised online lives were insulating us from opposing views, predicting how echo chambers could leave users sheltered from alternative opinions.

“The danger of these filters is that you think you are getting a representative view of the world and you are really, really not, and you don’t know it,” he explains. “Some of these problems that our fellow citizens are having kind of disappear from view without our really even realising.”

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Pariser was warning about the filter bubble half a decade ago; more recently he turned his attention to an even more hot-button topic – “fake news”.

Throughout the campaign, a slew of fabricated articles tapped into the prejudices of pro-Trump or pro-Clinton Facebook users by making up stories they wanted to believe. Filter bubbles may not have caused fake news, but they incubated them and helped them spread.

Facebook has since proposed its own solution – asking users to flag false stories, which are then assessed by third-party fact-checkers. Yet as Pariser and others have come to realise, the problem goes beyond the sort of completely false stories dreamed up by Macedonian teenagers for money.

“The more you look at it, the more of a complicated it gets,” he says, when asked whether he thinks Facebook’s plan will solve the problem. “It’s a whole set of problems; things that are deliberately false designed for political ends, things that are very slanted and misleading but not false; memes that are neither false nor true per se, but create a negative or incorrect impression. A lot of content has no factual content you could check. It’s opinion presented as fact.”

Fake news has exposed a deeper problem – what Pariser calls a “crisis of authority”.

“For better and for worse, authority and the ability to publish or broadcast went hand in hand. Now we are moving into this world where in a way every Facebook link looks like every other Facebook link and every Twitter link looks like every other Twitter link and the new platforms have not figured out what their theory of authority is.

“As a result we live in this information environment that is both on the one hand more filter-bubbly, but also the bounds of what is considered acceptable to talk about, acceptable to think, and the norms, seem to be shifting. It is changing the bounds of what the conversation can be in a way that I think is pretty corrosive.”

Despite his downbeat analysis, Parsier is resolutely positive about the potential for change, which may be linked to his campaigning background. He spent seven years working at the political fundraising and advocacy group MoveOn (where he helped found activist network Avaaz) before leaving after Barack Obama’s election in 2008 to write The Filter Bubble. It was only after the book was finished that he decided to try using the combination of online behaviour and algorithms he had described to achieve the progressive goals he had always worked towards. The result, in 2012, was the launch of Upworthy.

You may have seen Upworthy stories poking their way into your own filter bubble. With an unashamedly feelgood bent, and, at least in the early days, highly clickable, shareable and sensationalised “curiosity gap” headlines (example: This Kid Just Died. What He Left Behind Is Wondtacular), the idea was to repackage other people’s content about issues such as women’s rights or structural racism in a relatable and, importantly, shareable way.

The site, which was co-founded with a former managing editor of The Onion, Peter Koechley, grew rapidly (heralded at one point in 2013 as the fastest-growing media site of all time), using Facebook to build an audience of millions. Its tactics were not popular with those in the traditional news organisations, but it had a huge effect on the way most media looked at how stories spread online.

“There were times where there were particular headlines that when I looked back I kind of winced,” admits Pariser. “But I think the place that I came from was looking at how people engage on social media, and really thinking about how you build storytelling that works when someone is on their mobile phone, they are distracted and they are really quickly trying to figure out: what should I tune in to?”

Upworthy has retained some of the curiosity-baiting tactics, but is now focused on original content, overseen by former New York Times digital whizz Amy O’Leary as editorial director. It claims to reach 200 million people a month.

Pariser believes that Upworthy is in tune with the digital activism he started out in, and not just in getting people to engage with social issues online. What some disparagingly call clicktivism, he views as a step towards changing real-world behaviour.

“There’s an idea that people have some kind of action budget and either they are spending it on posting to social media or they are spending it on going to a march. Not only is there very little evidence to support that, there’s a lot of evidence both in social science and in my own experience of just running these experiments to the contrary.”

Pariser’s unwavering belief that in the ability of the web to be “a tremendous force for empathy” seems at odds with his analysis of its role in boosting the anti-progressive forces that recorded victories in 2016. Yet one of Upworthy’s – and Pariser’s – underlying assumptions is almost perfectly in tune with the populism of Trump and Brexit: that facts don’t change minds without emotion.

“The sort of classical model of democracy is one where it’s about information, making sure the populace has information to make good decisions,” says Pariser. “That’s absolutely a part of what is necessary, but I think if you don’t have empathy across groups then the information only goes so far.”

Pariser is banking on using the web to create unifying emotional responses, particularly ones that cross boundaries such as gender, race and wealth, rather than stoking divisions. He doesn’t appear to see much of an alternative. “I really believe that understanding and empathy are a critical pre-condition of action. And really of democracy.”

Recent events don’t suggest either understanding or empathy are going to be central to how the web influences politics in 2017. But maybe it’ll take another five years for him to be proven right again.